Backlinks Aren't Showing Up In Yahoo Site Explorer

I have a very perplexing situation going on with several sites and hope you may have some insights.

I use a company in India to do directory submissions. In the past, this has worked out great. For example, in early December I had 5000 directory submissions done for a new site, and within a week or so, the number of backlinks shown for the site by Yahoo! Site Explorer climbed from almost none to over 1000 and has now levelled off at about 2800. The toolbar PR for the site jumped from 0 to 2, and rankings for important keyphrases are excellent, especially for a new site. I've also had the same company do links for my own site with equally good results, including going from the middle of the page to #1 in Google for my best keyphrases.

Since then, I've ordered thousands of directory submissions for six other sites, all hosted by the same service as the first that I described. I have plenty of proof that the sites were submitted to directories and accepted by the directories. However, their link totals as shown by Yahoo's Site Explorer are all still in the toilet. Some have only increased by 25-30 and some have actually dropped.

When I asked the guy in India about one site in particular, he responded, "And moreover was the site down or has any loading issues ? If even once Google fails to access the site for any reason such as loading, server response errors etc you will find heavy backlinks drop but will definitely recover later on. Other than that I don't find any other valid reason for backlink drops."

I have noticed that over the past few weeks, I have experienced a lot of dropped connections any of these sites hosted by the same real estate site service. Often when I'm on the phone with prospective clients, I discuss previous projects with them and as I click links to them from my price info page, I frequently get dropped links.

Do you folks see these dropped connections as a valid concern? Does my guy in India know what he's talking about?

First off, I've never been a big believer in getting thousands of links quickly. I don't think it's a good idea, but if it works for you, I guess it doesn't matter whether I like it.

But this part of your post really stood out for me:

QUOTE

... these sites hosted by the same real estate site service...

These are all real estate sites, all hosted by the same service, and you're using one service to get many links to all of them in a short period of time. It seems to me that what you're doing is screaming to the search engines that you've got a pattern of unnatural link building going on. It's like choosing to mug an old lady right in front of a cop.

<snip> you're using one service to get many links to all of them in a short period of time. <snip>

No danger. This is just a guy who has a bunch of subcontractors located in different countries all around the world who sit around and do manual directory submissions to long lists of unrelated directories for pennies (or rupees). I got his name from a client who has used his service for 3 years. He has over 111,000 backlinks to his PR4, #1 ranked site for "MAJOR city luxury homes". And I also use a couple of other Indian guys.

I think you probably do need to take a closer look at the dropped connections you've been seeing. I couldn't tell you one way or another if this would affect backlink reports, but this really doesn't matter in the larger scheme of things. Because if you're getting dropped connections you can rest assured other real people and bots are as well. And that's a problem that needs to be corrected.

I'd be getting in touch with whoever admins the server to raise the concern. It could be something as simple as too many sites getting too much traffic on a single server, so a new one needs to be leased to move some traffic to a different machine. Or it could be the sites are all utilizing unoptimized databases, thus putting unnecessary strain on the server. Or there could be something more serious going on causing the server to fail.

Having too much traffic is a nice problem to have, but it is still a problem. One that can and will have a drastic effect on conversions.

Further exploring the site I asked about yesterday, I've found this peculiarity:

If I type linkdomain:ExampleDomain.net or linkdomain:www.ExampleDomain.net into Yahoo, Yahoo Site Explorer shows 113 inlinks 'except from this domain'. But, if I Google "www.ExampleDomain.net", Google shows 2630 incidents of that search term and most of the links that show appear to be the type of directories to which the service submits. So, why is Google catching the links while Yahoo isn't?

There has been only minimal improvement in rankings in the major search engines since I last checked them a month ago.